Some of the most fun I’ve had exploring meet-up wrestling these past few months has been just chatting with opponents during breaks in the action. Well, it’s a different kind of fun, but still very fun, and the conversations have really stuck with me. For example, I was just wearing out again our buddy Scott (aka, the Man of My Dreams) a few days ago. He really wanted a chance to redeem himself, I think, after he got a little more blogger-turned-wrestler than he was counting on the first time we wrestled several weeks ago. He seemed undaunted by my warnings that I’d received some excellent coaching at Wrestlefest Toronto (thanks again, guys!), and I was itching to try out some new holds. Long story short, I definitely did get the opportunity to practice some new holds and wrung even more submissions out of Scott than the first time.

During a break, Scott and I were comparing notes about having first explored what turns us on about wrestling before the internet was what it is today. We had this vivid shared memory (experienced separately, but so entirely the same for both of us) of trying to casually cruise the magazine aisles at stores, to catch sight of hot, shirtless guys on covers. Scott echoed exactly my experience of feeling outrageously conspicuous to even be seen looking at the covers of wrestling or fitness magazines, like I’d instantly be spotted for the way they turned me on. To purchase one felt essentially like coming out to the cashier. I must’ve cruised magazine aisles for months before finally plucking up the desperate courage and buying one. My collection grew quickly from there, even though every purchase made my heart pound.

I had a similar conversation during a break in one of my matches with SeattleFight in Toronto. I told with him about this crystal clear memory I have (I can tell you exactly the store I was in, where on the magazine rack it was) of catching sight of Kevin Von Erich on the cover of a wrestling magazine. I’d never seen Kevin before. Instant erection. It was like porn, just sitting out there for everyone to see. Honestly, actual porn has never done for me quite what eye fucking the likes of barefoot Kevin in his yellow trunks in that magazine did for me, much less actually watching Kevin wrestle once I obsessively tracked down where to find World Class Championship Wrestling playing on my TV.

I actually felt more conspicuous buying wrestling magazines than more generic bodybuilding magazines, because of the turn on I got from wrestling. My stash of masturbation inspiration was mostly populated with Muscle & Fitness and Musclemag International, because, in my still-sketchy theory of mind at the time, I felt like there was something less obviously sexual about bodybuilders in posing straps than hot pro wrestlers in classic 80’s trunks. But, of course, what really got me off about the bodybuilders was imagining them wrestling.

In recent years, I’ve become friends with younger guys into wrestling, who discovered and explored what excites them by just typing some magic words into Google. Hell, I’ve even found out that some of these now-friends were bypassing the age-restrictions to read my homoerotic wrestling fiction 10 or more years ago, discovering the center and the edges of what turns them on about wrestling at least partially with the help of my words… as well as thousands of hours of pro wrestling matches on YouTube… as well as specifically gay wrestling producers connecting the dots between the erotic subtext of wrestling and babyface heroes and heel villains in mainstream pro.

There was a time when I wondered if I was so keyed into wrestling because, when I was coming of age, it was one of the few, regular, publicly consumable sources of hot, athletic guys wearing very little clothing, wrapping their hot bodies around each other (just writing this sentence is turning me on, frankly). Like, I’ve wondered if there is a wrestling kink, if erotic wrestling and erotic fiction and mainstream gay characters in media and, not to mention, ubiquitous porn, are available at the click of a button. Does mainstreaming the gay erotic gaze (or at least making it easier to focus it on a variety of sources) mean that a niche kink like gay erotic wrestling will even exist for long?

I’m shit at predicting the future (I gave up on that after the 2016 US Presidential election), so I certainly don’t have a definitive answer. But my hunch is that wrestling kink is going to endure a while. While I’ve enjoyed so much meeting and wrestling with guys my age and older, I’ve also been pretty fascinated by meeting and wrestling with younger guys, who grew up with entirely different pathways and options for exploring what turns them on, and who found themselves at pretty much the same destination that I did. In an age when there are seemingly infinite sources of material to titillate, there are a lot gay and bisexual young guys powerfully drawn by their dizzying erections to watch mainstream wrestling, consume homoerotic wrestling, and explore what turns them on about it in the context of meet-up wrestling. And I know for a fact that some of them feel super self-conscious about it still, but it’s certainly a different world from when I was stopped dead in my tracks by Kevin Von Erich on the cover of a wrestling magazine, and thought to myself that I had never seen anything that sexy, and wondered if I ever would again.